space travel

Featured Article

Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026

Max Space’s expandable habitats promise to be larger, stronger, and more versatile than anything like them ever launched, not to mention cheaper and lighter by far than a solid, machined structure.

Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026

The journal Nature recently published a package of 44 papers about aerospace medicine and space biology. Beyond the specific findings of each paper, what was…

TechCrunch Minute: What does space tourism do to our bodies?

We could be entering a renaissance for human spaceflight research, as a record number of private citizens head to space — and as scientists improve techniques for gathering data on…

We’re about to learn a whole lot more about how the human body reacts to space 

This is the last major step before Starliner can be certified as an operational crew system, and the first Starliner mission is expected to launch in 2025. 

Boeing’s Starliner astronaut capsule is en route to the ISS 

The Equity team’s 2022 predictions

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. As is tradition on the show, we used the last episode of the year to make predictions about the next year. To continue an annual tradition, Grace and Chris joined Natasha and Mary…

The Equity team’s 2022 predictions

With the “final frontier” now open to private companies, how do we transform the way we continually update the software that runs in space?

DevOps transformation: Taking edge computing and continuous updates to space

Space can and should be about much more than giving the 1% another Instagrammable moment and increasing the wealth of the billionaires who provide the service.

We must subsidize and regulate space exploration

A startup with a new type of spacecraft propulsion system could make the interplanetary travel seen in “Star Trek” a reality. Magdrive has just closed a £1.4 million seed round…

Magdrive secures seed funding for new propulsion system which could take us to the stars

If you’re a part of the early-stage startup space race, or aspire to such celestial heights, don’t miss out on early-bird savings to TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17.…

Four days left to save big on tickets to TC Sessions: Space 2020

Kayhan Space, the Boulder, Colorado and Atlanta-based company launched from Techstars’ virtual space-focused accelerator, wants nothing more than to be the air traffic control service for satellites in space. Founded…

Kayhan Space wants to be the air traffic control service for satellites in space

Not to be confused with the smart TV platform of the same name (2010-2014, RIP) or the Android TV platform it’s built on top of, Google has just taken the…

The new Google TV brings streaming apps, live TV and search into a single interface

Every radical turn in technology history has its great entrepreneur, and for space that person is SpaceX founder Elon Musk. His unswerving conviction that “space must be affordable” led him…

Disrupting Space: A new event from TechCrunch

The number of objects in orbit around Earth has been growing, and growing fast. Before 1957, of course, there were a total of zero human-made objects in the orbital region…

Why Maxar CTO Walter Scott thinks now is the time to address the orbital traffic boom

Featured Article

Frontier technologies are moving closer to the center of venture investment

As the technologies that were once considered science fiction become the purview of science, the venture capital firms that were once investing at the industry’s fringes are now finding themselves at the heart of the technology industry. Investing in the commercialization of technologies like genetic engineering, quantum computing, digital avatars,…

Frontier technologies are moving closer to the center of venture investment

The future of rocket manufacturing has touched down in Mississippi. At NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center, nestled in Hancock County, Miss., right on the border of Louisiana, the Los…

Relativity is building a 3D-printing rocket manufacturing hub in Mississippi

Featured Article

Jeff Bezos aims Blue Origin at the Moon

Today at a packed event blocks from the White House, Jeff Bezos took the stage in front of select members of the media, executives, government officials and a gaggle of middle schoolers to reveal new details of his plan to get to the Moon by 2024.  Blue Origin is going…

Jeff Bezos aims Blue Origin at the Moon

One of the most important upcoming events in the space industry is undoubtedly the advent of SpaceX and Boeing’s competing crew-bearing capsules, which the companies have been working on for…

SpaceX and Boeing commercial crew capsule test dates slip yet again

Avery Haskell says he first knew he wanted to be an astronaut ever since he was a boy growing up in Houston near NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The 24-year-old Stanford…

Meet Shuttle, the company that’s building a booking agent for spaceflight

Alchemist is the Valley’s premiere enterprise accelerator and every season they feature a group of promising startups. They are also trying something new this year: they’re putting a reserve button…

Meet the startups in the latest Alchemist class

“Where we are at the beginning of this century is where Star Trek begins,” says Alan Stern, the NASA researcher who was one of the architects of the New Horizons…

With moon mining, space tourism and colonization on the horizon, Star Trek is only years away
Space

The ethics of colonizing Mars

Should we take ourselves to other planets? Human rationality and values have woven dark, damaged, all-powerful systems into the tapestry of civilization. Most notably: capitalism and consumerism. Do we see…

The ethics of colonizing Mars

Watch The First Donut In Space

It’s hard to believe that a month ago humans were unable to launch a donut into space. It was March 2015 and the world was in turmoil. Space travel was…

Watch The First Donut In Space

NASA has announced a deal with SpaceX and Boeing to build space taxis to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station. This deal will end NASA’s reliance on expensive Russian…

NASA Partners With Boeing And SpaceX To Send Astronauts Up In Space Taxis

Private sector space tech companies — from Virgin Galactic to Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) — have been doing what only government agencies were empowered to do in earlier generations, launch…

Hardware

CrunchDeals: 30-minute space flight for $74,000

A London banker named Per Wimmer will be taking a 30-minute space ride in XCOR’s “Lynx” two-seat suborbital space plane (see our previous coverage) in 2010. Los Angeles-based XCOR is…

Rich is apart of the Virgin America and Virgin Galactic exchange program that allows VA captains the opportunity to pilot the Virgin Galactic flights when they start in 2010. He’s…

Hardware

White Knight 2 photo gallery

Isn’t she beautiful?

This isn’t really new, but it’s certainly awesome. You read that right, an ion engine. It’s not just a science fiction trope, it’s a real thing. Ion engines produce very…

I actually am pretty sure that the people who can spend $2,000,000 on space tourism are a different demographic from the people who scrounge miles to get free tickets. And…